BT, (British Telecom) the incumbent phone company in the United Kingdom, is planning to shut off all of its legacy phone networks - a hodge podge of systems that includes the traditional "circuit switched" system that has served as the architecture for delivering phone calls for more than a century - by 2010. In its place, BT is installing a single network based on Internet Protocol, the language of the Internet. And the first town to make the conversion to the new network is Cardiff, a former coal port....
[W]hat's really cool about what will happen in Cardiff - and eventually the rest of the U.K. - is that BT is creating an open, standards-based platform for which anyone can develop new applications. In other words, the phone has the potential to become more like the Internet with its proliferation of cool new Web sites, tools and services. "This whole thing is based on openness and transparency," says Paul Reynolds, chief executive of BT's wholesale operations. "We want to allow experimentation by application developers."
This is no small thing. Right now, for example, most of the mildly interesting stuff consumers can do with their phones - call waiting, caller ID, call forwarding - is programmed right into the big computers that route calls around the network. That makes it virtually impossible for some entrepreneur in a garage or some teenager tinkering at his computer to develop a new phone service.
By moving to an Internet-based architecture, British Telecom enables that tinkering teen to spend time he might have dedicated to making Google "mashups" to creating a fun application for the phone network. "We are doing what Google is doing," says Reynolds, referring to Google's willingness to make some of its application programming interfaces (APIs) available to the public.
Comment. Kudos to BT. The fact that we can barely imagine the power of mashups between the phone system and the rest of the internet is the reason to do this, not the reason to resist. Opening the door will put imagination and cleverness to work, not keep them shut out.
Here's one potential mashup. Press 1 for an eprint. Dial a repository, identify an eprint, press 1, and a copy is on its way by email. The repository grabbed your email address from another mashup that connects email addresses with phone IDs. Here's another: Press 2 for an audio reading of the eprint. A pleasant computerized voice reads the eprint to you over the phone. Press 3 for an MP3 of this eprint. If you liked the audio reading and want a copy, or if you just didn't have time to finish listening to it in the cab on the way to the airport, ask for an MP3 to be sent to your email. You can listen to it on your iPod the next time you go jogging.
Or instead of using the phone to send content to your computer, use your computer to send content to your phone. Click here to send an audio reading of this file (or this podcast lecture) to your cell phone voicemail. You're running out the door but can listen to the file on your commute.
Sure, there will be new kinds of spam, but there will also be new kinds of spam solution. Spam wasn't a reason to keep email systems closed. Bring on the utility and plan to mop up as we go.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/04/2006 09:59:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
